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I am willing to be kind and help others but I will not do so to people who try to hurt me in any way. I draw this line at physical violence, threatening my employment and ability to feed and house myself. I have no problems avenging myself on people who do these things to me and keep it within legal bounds.

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So the questions are:
- What moral principles (if any) guide your day to day life?

Generally it's to do nothing that would harm other human beings. But there's always a compromise or else it wouldn't concern morality. Should I favor one person over another? The same question applies to groups of people. Very often it involves my own personal interests as a functioning member of society. Personally, I tend to place concern for my family at the top. I myself come in second. The average person on the street third. The people I work with fourth. As the relationship becomes more distant the rationale becomes less rigid simply because what I do will have less influence. Not to say these relationships couldn't outweigh those closer ones. And symbolic acts can also fall in the moral domain. So allegiance to one's local community is up there along with one's country. The well being of Humanity as a whole is of ultimate importance, and that's because I believe it's the primary purpose and source of all moral reasoning.

- How do you (if you do) gauge that you're living your life to the standards you've set for yourself?

Often I don't know or it's just hard to be sure. Peace of mind and sleeping well are a good sign though.

A quick recap of the negative ethics I have described previously (described in more detail by its originator at the link):

-All humans are born into a terminal situation we naturally wish to postpone, containing no value except what we manage to create and not enough space to do so without interfering with each other

-The basic moral imperative that all ethical systems have in common is to consider the interests of others and not just your own, to act in a way that is respectful of the fact that others exist and have preferences

-Due to the situation we find ourselves in, it is structurally impossible to live according to this fundamental ethical norm, as everything we do necessarily deprives someone else and disrespects their projects

-A system of morals that sidesteps this issue and merely instructs us how we should behave having already entered the situation that impedes us from being truly moral is a secondary or second-degree morality, situated within the moral impossibility described above

-A primary or first-degree morality recognizes the structural impediment and disqualification that our condition as humans entails from birth and will reach different conclusions about several important areas, such as suicide and procreation

To the extent that second-degree ethics assumes up-front that it is possible to live morally, and that life has positive intrinsic value that we can appeal to in our striving to act in accordance with it, they may all be called "affirmative" ethics. This category contains most of the moral theories that have been described in the history of civilization from Europe to Asia.

An ethics that, at least initially, opens up the possibility of the received conditions of human life being incompatible with the most basic moral duties, and asserts that no human acts can ever be moral in the first-degree or primary sense (though they may be moral for secondary reasons, like the good of the country) may be called "negative" ethics.

In affirmative ethics, there is a strong impulse toward regarding suicide as a great evil and procreation as a sublime good. This polarity flips in negative ethics. Suicide, though still disqualified from being truly moral in the same way as any human act, has a better chance at being moral if it removes oneself from harming others. And procreation is seen not as the bestowing of a gift but as a manipulation of another human being, not just in terms of what they might do with their time, but in the sense of bringing them into the same terminal existence that obligates them to disrespect others in their struggle to postpone its consummation.

So, for my part, I don't blame other people for their failings, try to give them as much space as they need to work out their problems, and I don't ever intend to have children. I actually love children; it's parents I have a problem with, and don't want to become one. I'm not suicidal, but I don't have any qualms with suicide and generally respect people who decide to do it, rather than immediately categorizing them as mentally ill. Those are my primary ethical stances. In the secondary realm--that is, assuming that we are all continuing forward as a species, regardless of whether or not it's good in itself to do so--I'm a communist.